January 20, 2018

Parents Can't Apply the Same Formula That Worked For Them to their Children

by John Lawrence, January 19, 2018

My parents were great people. They had a certain approach to life that worked very well for them. Of course they encouraged me to follow the same approach. Call it a formula for success in life. The only problem was that their formula didn't work for me. I had to find my own formula. Their formula was basically the Protestant ethic: work hard, delay gratification until later, get ahead. It is the view that a person's duty is to achieve success through hard work and thrift, such success being a sign that that one has found favor with God. First work hard in school. Go as far as you can go in the educational system. Then get a good job after which you can start enjoying life.

In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber wrote that capitalism in Northern Europe evolved when the Protestant (particularly Calvinist) ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the accumulation of wealth for investment. In other words, the Protestant work ethic was an important force behind the unplanned and uncoordinated emergence of modern capitalism.

In the mid twentieth century a counterculture developed exemplified by the hippies that rejected this view of life. Life was to be lived in the moment not put off to some distant future after working hard and delaying satisfaction for most of your youth and childhood. Work was not the most essential part of life. Life was, and work was only incidental. After all with the wealth that had already been accumulated by mid twentieth century, what was the point of working hard and delaying gratification?

In my case I'm psychologically unlike my parents in my basic make-up so I eventually found a formula that worked for me after much trial and error. It involved rejecting the Protestant Ethic and much of the capitalist system including materialistic accumulation. I needed to live my life in the moment to keep my head above water psychologically. Different strokes for different folks. Some parents find this hard to understand - that their kid could be so unlike them - but it happens. The human race is made up of a large diversity of psychological types. That's why tolerance and understanding is so important. Forcing everyone into the same mold doesn't work either for individuals or nations.